Monday, July 23, 2012

Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs are really getting some people excited and the sheer numbers are amazing - although is this a fad and or a function of supply? From the NYTimes an interview with Anant Agarwal of MIT who's first class enrolled 150,000 students (NYTimes)

Did you expect so much demand?

With no marketing dollars, I thought we might get 200 students. When we
posted on the Web site that we were taking registration and the course
would start in March, my colleague Piotr Mitros called and said, “We’re
getting 10,000 registrations a day.” I fell off my seat and said,
“Piotr, are you sure you’ve got the decimal point right?” My most
fearful moment was when we launched the course. I worried that the
system couldn’t handle it, and would keel over and die.

...

Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of
the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than
half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157
passed the course. What do you make of that?

A large number of the students who sign up for MOOCs are browsing, to
see what it’s like. They might not have the right background for the
course. They might just do a little bit of the coursework. Our course
was M.I.T.-hard and needed a very, very solid background. Other students
just don’t have time to do the weekly assignments. One thing we’re
thinking of is to offer multiple versions of the course, one that would
last a semester and one that could stretch over a year. That would help
some people complete.

And from The Atlantic a profile of Coursera which they suggest is the "Single Most Important Experiment in Education" (Altantic):

But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an
inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally
been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious
recruitment practices and poor results. That's because the new
partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the
top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes
the rest of academia.
Coursera has previously teamed with
Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of
Michigan to offer 43 courses, which according to the New York Times
enrolled 680,000 students. It now adds to its roster Duke, Caltech,
University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Rice,
Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, University of
Illinois Urbana-Champagne, University of Toronto, University of
Edinburgh, and Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Only
one school, the University of Washington, said it will give credit for
its Coursera classes. But two others, University of Pennsylvania and
Caltech, said they would invest $3.7 million into the enterprise,
bringing the company's venture funding to more than $22 million.
Literally, colleges are buying in.

Suggestions that independent bookstore protectionism works in other countries - should it be implemented in the US? (Atlantic)

Here in the U.S., most bookstores survive in tales of grassroots preservation or community campaigns. Price-fixing is undoubtedly the least likely American solution, though as Jason Boog has pointed out at NPR, booksellers and publishers actually did persuade FDR to enforce a price floor to prevent Macy’s from undercutting small book retailers with loss-leader pricing on Gone with the Wind during the Great Depression. (That policy was later declared unconstitutional, but it did throw a wrench in the Macy’s strategy.) This April, though, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and several publishers of colluding to raise the price of e-books to compete with Amazon’s price-discounting. Don’t expect to see federal protection of local bookstores via price-setting anytime soon.

Possibly the worlds most bizarre library carrel but some interesting ideas for the future of libraries (Harvard):

In the seminar’s freewheeling atmosphere, ideas flew like cream pies at a
food fight. What if behind-the-scenes work could take place in the open
instead, suggested Matthew Battles, a fellow at the Berkman Center.
“What if you set up somebody processing medieval manuscripts in Widener
or Lamont—a processing station in a public space?” Battles had just come
from a used-furniture depository, where he’d been scavenging for
shelves that could be repurposed for use as curator stations, places
where faculty members or librarians could be asked to curate small
collections of books. “What about a mobile, inflatable library?”
suggested Goldenson. “What would that do?” Or how about an “Artist in
Reference,” he continued. “We could bring in experts in a particular
subject to serve as guest reference librarians in their area of
expertise.” Schnapp, running with the idea, noted that “Widener contains
collections in fields that haven’t been taught at Harvard in a hundred
years, where we have the best collections of materials.”

Is wikipedea looking to set up their own travel information and guide site (Skift):

Imagine a free TripAdvisor focused on travel destinations, where
masses of travelers could update information during or after their hotel
stay, tour or private meanderings around town, and share it with the
world under the supervision of seasoned administrators.
The foundation’s board of trustees on July 11 approved a proposal
[see Update below] to launch an advertisement-free travel guide [see
Update below] and community members noted that 31 of the 48
administrators of the Internet Brands-owned Wikitravel have expressed interest in joining forces with the Wikimedia Foundation’s travel guide website.
Wikitravel is considered the current leader in travel wikis, but its
advertisements and monetization efforts may turn off travelers and
would-be contributors.
In addition, the introduction to a community discussion about the
travel guide proposal argues that Internet Brands has failed to keep
pace with the times and that Wikitravel suffers from a “lack of
technical support/feature development.”

The report's findings indicate that the greatest challenge to
researchers is the difficulty of access to e-journals. It is easy to see
why: doctoral students across all subjects told us that they
predominantly look for secondary published resources to inform their
research, and for over 80% of researchers, this means accessing full
text journal articles.
These same materials are often subject to
licensing restrictions and other limitations imposed by e-journals
publishers and other information service providers. This appears to be
an area of sharpening tension in the doctoral and broader research
community, with the majority of students surveyed describing it as a
'significant constraint' in the research process, and one of the biggest
frustrations affecting their work.
Despite the ongoing debate around open access in the media, the report's findings have told us that there is a significant level of confusion among researchers around what open access means, or even how reliable open access materials are.
Another
finding from the report shows that as many as 35% of those researchers
surveyed in 2011 did not receive any face-to-face training in research
and information-seeking skills in the previous academic year, even
though 65% of researchers ranked it as their most important training
need. These outcomes are concerning, but fortunately they are also an
area where significant improvements can be made, through increasing
face-to-face training and support for researchers when they start their
PhD programmes, but also much earlier as they enter higher education.

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Michael Cairns

I enjoy discussing the publishing industry and in particular the changes that impact the business. On PND, I don't write about everything, just the things that interest me.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.